There’s real truth in the terrible service flaws of the previous taxi system, but the employment flaws of Uber are being smothered with the service improvements they’ve introduced. That’s not the only issue worth caring about.
I’d like to hear more evidence. until then it seems like a comforting thought for a libertarian rather than a sober description of reality.
You’re on the internet arguing with imaginary strawmen for your amusement. It’s not time well spent.
HN is obviously not a hive mind, but in in general, for facets of the HN crowd, the investor class, those with conservative/libertarian views on labor, business owners, etc. the default view is simply to not empathize with the service worker.
For whatever it's worth, I tend to err a bit toward the "more regulation" end of the spectrum, but I don't feel the need to believe that the world is simple and everyone who doesn't subscribe to my simplistic view is morally deficient.
Except this counterpoint is not based on real evidence but largely based on purely theoretical arguments which have been shown numerous times to be way too simplistic.
Having workers tie themselves to a company for 40 hours a week being the only valid way to make money is conservative thinking, be a bit progressive and see how much freedom this potentially opens up for workers.
The issue ttjjtt and others are pointing out about Uber are not around binding employees to one employer for a fixed 40 hour workweek. In fact, I'd bet ttjjtt would support labor laws which limit a businesses ability to punish employees for moonlighting.
The issue is, like amazon's mechanical turk, that Uber is cutting corners, costs, and wages for their "employees" in ways that are both legal and illegal while secretly lobbying to make it easier for them to reduce benefits.
This is a market leader using their position to harm their workers. "Conservative thinking" is that "why do we need all these labor rules and protections for employees? They signed up for it!" Progressive thinking is "Maybe we shouldn't let businesses set the rules for how they treat employees?"
Right, so make regulators get off their asses and start draft up some reasonable regulations where workers can work freely like they can with uber and mechanical turk? Just banning that sort of freedom entirely is conservative thinking, since it aims to preserve the shitty situation we have where everyone needs to have a "job". Today people can't even imagine a society where you don't have a job, you just go and do things that are useful and get rewarded the full fruit of your labour, that sort of thing is possible with Ubers offerings and a bit of regulations, why go all in on preventing that future from happening?
Uber works great for users, we know that. Uber would also work great for drivers if the drivers got a larger cut. So what is the problem, just regulate it and everything gets better than under the old Taxi systems. Why is this so hard to imagine? And no, this is not over regulating at all, at least not more than for example limiting how many Taxi's are allowed to operate in the city etc which is already happening.
Did you read the article?
The issue is 2 fold.
1. Uber is lobbying heavily for regulators to NOT do that.
2. We have an entire political party in the US (Republicans) that are "anti-regulation" and fight tooth and nail against new regulations.
If we want "regulators" to make things better, we need to put in regulators that want to regulate.
This doesn't matter on a state level, for example democrats could easily create such regulations in New York or California if they wanted to.
> Uber is lobbying heavily for regulators to NOT do that.
Yes, every corporation lobbies for laws that favors them, this is nothing new. Lobbying isn't corrupt, politicians making under the table deals with corporations is the bad part, lobbying is just corporations telling politicians what kind of laws the corporation would want.
And then paying money to politicians who offer to do what the corporations want. Lobbying (at least as practiced in the US, where it is considered "free speech" for corporations to "donate" money to politicians they like) is very clearly legalized corruption - there really is no other valid way to look at it.
Yes, it is slightly more expensive than Uber, but the drivers have been vetted by the municipal government, proved their ability to speak the local language and know their way around the city and are insured to be able to pay you off if they crash.
Unlike Uber, they are - in fact - independent contractors. They are actually proud about their freedom.
Uber, OTOH, works here mostly by way of these shady folk who rent cars to disadvantaged immigrants who barely speak the language, collecting most of their earnings, forcing them to drive north of 12 hours per day before they return to Poland or Ukraine in 6 months.
> Right, so make regulators get off their asses and start draft up some reasonable regulations where workers can work freely like they can with uber and mechanical turk? Just banning that sort of freedom entirely is conservative thinking, since it aims to preserve the shitty situation we have where everyone needs to have a "job".
Trying to pass such regulations runs against massive lobbying efforts by companies. Amazon, Uber don't care about giving employees flexibility. They are free to give workers the flexibility, nothing is preventing them from doing it. They use this model to reduce benefits to give their workers. It is incredibly hard to pass regulations against these lobbying efforts. However regulations that companies need to give their workers benefits do already exist, that's why Ubers operations were deemed illegal in places.
> Today people can't even imagine a society where you don't have a job, you just go and do things that are useful and get rewarded the full fruit of your labour, that sort of thing is possible with Ubers offerings and a bit of regulations, why go all in on preventing that future from happening?
The argument is that the future is that people don't have the choice of " just go and do things that are useful and get rewarded the full fruit of your labour," but instead are locked into highly unfavourable situations, with no choice (because of their economic situation) and at the same time skirting around tax obligations, just to enrich the investor class behind Uber.
That did already happen, just look at what Über did with the Uber Black loans where drivers got enticed into car loans with promises of guaranteed income, just for Uber to reduce the fares. This is essentially the same as how servdom in Russia worked.
> So what is the problem, just regulate it and everything gets better than under the old Taxi systems. Why is this so hard to imagine?
That's the whole point about the Uber leaks. Uber was not willing to work under the existing worker protection frameworks, they even exited markets where they were forced to (e.g. Switzerland).